Oscar brings the Syrian doctor who treated thousands during war, into limelight

If there is one category of people who are a major casualty in conflict, apart from normal civilians, it is doctors. In the normal course of things, doctors would be rushing to tend to the injured, healing their wounds and saving their lives. But in the war zones of Syria, they are in the line of fire, and dying in the process. One doctor who is risking her all to save her patients is Syrian doctor Amani Ballour, who has been striving tirelessly to save thousands of lives in an underground hospital during the war in her country.

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Dr Ballour's humanitarian work has made her the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary "The Cave." It spotlights the life of the bold doctor who under the onslaught of gunfire and aerial bombings, puts her own life on the line to save precious human lives.

The 32-year-old paediatrician, who is still haunted by the dying and mutilated children she had to treat, hopes the attention the film has garnered will remind the world that the horror of the Syrian war is about to enter its ninth year.

Syrian paediatrician and main character of the documentary "The Cave", Dr. Amani Ballour.

"For me it is not a film, it's my life, my reality," Dr Ballour said before she obtained a visa allowing her to attend the Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles on Sunday.

The harrowing 102-minute film shows the doctor not just struggling to keep wounded children alive in her operating theatre in the former rebel stronghold of Eastern Ghouta, but also having to deal with sexism as a woman in charge of a Syrian hospital.

 'Hell on Earth'

"The Oscar nomination will help throw more light onto the Syrian cause, and hopefully help push people to support us," said Ballour.

The rebel enclave was described as "Hell on Earth" by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres as it was being pummelled by President Bashar al-Assad's forces.

This image released by National Geographic shows Dr. Amani, right, escorting a young girl into a hospital in Syria.

With the war still raging in Syria, half a million people have been displaced in the last two months.

"When I was at home I could help people, I was calmer despite all the difficulties, the bombardments, the hunger and the tragedies we were witnessing every day," she said.

Instead, the young woman who has just won the Raoul Wallenberg Prize from the Council of Europe for her "exceptional humanitarian acts", is haunted by the suffering of her thousands of child patients.

"The children did not understand anything... They always asked what was happening, why are they bombing us, why they were hungry. It was very difficult to explain to them," the doctor said.

Feras Fayyad, Sigrid Dyekjaer (L) and Kirstine Barfod nominated for an Oscar for best documentary feature for "The Cave."

Yet the documentary, made by the Syrian director Firas Fayyad, has moments of joy, like an improvised birthday party, when surgical gloves were blown up to serve as balloons.

The medical staff became "one big family, we tried to find moments of joy... so we could feel human again," she said.

But as well as the daily horrors, Dr Ballour had to put up with the sexism in what is still a very conservative environment.

"At the start, I heard them say things like (as a woman) I was not up to it. As well as all the pressures of the job, I had to prove that women were capable" of running a hospital, she said.